This page is a compendium of items of interest - news stories, scurrilous rumors, links, academic papers, damnable prevarications, rants and amusing anecdotes - about LAUSD and/or public education that didn't - or haven't yet - made it into the "real" 4LAKids blog and weekly e-newsletter at http://www.4LAKids.blogspot.com . 4LAKidsNews will be updated at arbitrary random intervals.

Saturday, January 30, 2016

January 28, 2016 10:04 am :: For all the successful magnet schools in LA Unified and elsewhere,
they are not attracting as much federal support as charter schools.

That was a stark message from the district’s federal lobbyist, who
told a district board committee this week that Washington is increasing
national support for charter schools by nearly 32 percent but by only 6
percent for magnet schools, a difference that surprised some of the
school board members.

“We never imagined this would ever be this much of a discrepancy,” board president Steve Zimmer said at a meeting of the board’s Committee of the Whole.

The money for charters rose to $350 million from $270 million while
the magnet school support increased to $96 million from $91 million,
according to Joel Packer, of the Raben Group, which lobbies for the district in Washington.

“Charter schools have big bipartisan support in Congress,” Packer
said. “They got a big increase. Magnet schools don’t have the same
political clout.”

In response to Packer’s overall report outlining changes in federal education policy, committee chairman George McKenna pointed
out, “Charters can lobby and have money to give to campaigns and give
to board members. Magnets don’t have that ability; they are not separate
legal entities.”

Zimmer wondered if the charter money could also go to affiliated
charters, which are still associated with LAUSD employee standards and
controls.

“No one can seem to answer that,” he said. “And the Republicans don’t even know what they are.”
Board member Mónica Ratliff said, “We have some
amazing magnet schools, maybe we need to do a better job at publicizing
what a great job they are doing and replicate more of them.”
Magnet schools are specialized schools within the traditional public
school model, and LAUSD has 125 of them, including specialized schools
that have a focus on things like police academies and computer science.
“I am very disappointed,” said board member Scott Schmerelson.
“Charter schools have excellent propaganda. I have been enlightened,
but I have also been bewildered. Who is talking up the LAUSD magnet
schools and telling them how wonderful we are?”

Superintendent Michelle King said, “If the word is not out, it needs to get out, our magnet schools are tremendous.”

King added, “The highest performing of the schools are our magnet
schools, and they are outperforming charters. If we want to incubate
what is working, we need to look at magnet schools.”
Packer’s report also showed increases in Title I money, state grants,
preschool grants, adult education, Head Start, child care and more,
with the only cuts in school improvement grants. Packer noted that some
funding restructuring can end up benefitting LA Unified in the future.

The board was also apprised of other federal changes, including the
successor to No Child Left Behind, known as the Every Student Succeeds
Act. It reduces the emphasis in a standardized test and more autonomy
for states to assess their schools. States will have to identify the
lowest performing five percent of schools. That also concerned
superintendent King.

“That signals to me that it could be mostly LAUSD schools,” King
said.

She was told that the new state guidelines are being discussed now
at the state level, and that LAUSD should be involved in how schools
are assessed.

Overall, the budget news was better than in years past, said Zimmer, who went to Washington many times to lobby in person.

“If we keep telling the LA story on Capitol Hill, of the districts
like ours and families like ours, they they will understand how
important role of education truly is,” he said.

January 27, 2016 | As they presented oral arguments
before an appellate court Wednesday, attorneys in a high-profile lawsuit hoped
that justices will allow them to go to trial to prove that by inadequately
funding public schools the state is violating California students’ constitutional
right to a quality education.

The three justices on the 1st District Court of Appeal in
San Francisco must rule within the next 90 days on whether to overturn a ruling
by an Alameda County Superior Court judge who dismissed the case, Robles-Wong
v. California, on grounds that there’s no constitutional right to an adequately
funded education. In that ruling, Judge Steven Brick said the Legislature has
the right to set funding levels as it chooses.

The case consolidates two lawsuits filed in 2010 —
Campaign for Quality Education v. California and the Robles-Wong case.

In a session lasting more than an hour, justices on the
court focused on the issue in the lawsuits’ core claim, that insufficient
funding levels are denying children their constitutional right to an education
that prepares them to participate fully in economic and civil life.

The justices focused on the key idea of the concept of
quality, while the attorney for the state, Joshua Sondheimer, said the state
does not oversee quality.

Steven Mayer, an attorney for the plaintiffs in
Robles-Wong, told the justices that the state Supreme Court has held that
education is a constitutional right in the state, “and a violation of that
right has occurred.”

The Legislature defines quality education in establishing
high academic standards but it hasn’t provided enough funding so that all
students can meet those standards, Mayer said.

While a ruling by the three justices won’t be issued for
several weeks, it could be groundbreaking if the justices decide that a quality
education is constitutionally guaranteed.

Justice Peter Siggins acknowledged that under the state’s
current system there is “a disparity of opportunity” for students.

Mayer said that a minimal level of state funding, which
Proposition 98 guarantees, doesn’t ensure quality education.

“We can’t have a system where half the students are not
proficient,” Mayer argued, and pointed out that California students
consistently rank near the bottom of the nation in academic performance. Furthermore,
more funding, not simply redistributing funding, is needed, he added.

Sondheimer argued that there is “no qualitative level for
education in the state Constitution.”

That prompted Justice Martin Jenkins to assert that
“there must be a qualitative element in every classroom.”

Plaintiffs in the Robles case are the California School
Boards Association, the California State PTA, the association of California
School Administrators, the California Teachers Association, the Youth &
Education Law Project at Stanford Law School and 60 individuals, including the
lead plaintiff, Maya Robles-Wong, who was a junior at Alameda High School when
the suits were filed. The Campaign for Quality Education suit was filed by
Public Advocates Inc., which represented five nonprofits serving low-income,
minority families.

Alameda County Superior Court Judge Steven Brick
dismissed both lawsuits in December 2011. In his rulings, Brick acknowledged
students’ fundamental right to an education, but he said the state Constitution
does not require the Legislature to fund public education at a specific level.
The plaintiffs appealed the decision to the state appeals court in San
Francisco, and the court combined the two lawsuits into one.

The new figures updated the ones based on decade-old
published studies, which the association submitted as evidence in the Robles
case.

The new report asserts that the $64 billion that Gov.
Jerry Brown proposes to spend on K-12 schools in the 2016-2017 school year to
implement the Common Core, other state standards and to fulfill the eight
priorities of the Local Control Funding Formula, would fall tens of billions of
dollars short of what is needed for the state to ensure that every child has
access to quality learning.

January 28, 2016 :: Proponents of turning half of Los Angeles’ public schools into
privately run charter schools in five years have a brazen new strategy.
After running into obstacles last fall at the locally elected school
board overseeing America’s second-largest school district, they’re looking at capturing the mayor's office in 2017.

Steve Barr, who helped create the Green Dot Charter Schools group and has been involved in numerous controversial efforts
to privatize the L.A. school system, has told local newspapers he is
exploring a mayoral run due to Mayor Eric Garcetti’s hands-off approach
to education.

“I’ve talked to at least a half-dozen people who
will tell you he won’t get involved because it’s too controversial,”
Barr told the Los Angeles Times, which reported that Barr,
“wants to enter the race but will only do so if he can see a path to
building a campaign with adequate political and financial backing.”

Some
of the nation’s wealthiest billionaires, such as Los Angeles’ Eli Broad
and the Walton Family Foundation, have eyed Los Angeles as a major
target for privatizing traditional public schools in the next five
years. Broad has floated a $490 million plan to transform the district with 4.5 million students (!), and Walton—funded by Walmart profits—have pledged spending $1 billion from 2016 to 2020 to expand charter schools in 15 cities, including Los Angeles.

Other
California technology entrepreneurs—such as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings
and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg—have also pledged multi-millions to
expand charters. They are no longer political newcomers, having been
involved in both successful and unsuccessful charter-related campaigns
in recent years. In other words, it’s likely that Barr’s campaign would
find no shortage of major donors or “independent” backers.

The
push to privatize L.A. schools has become increasingly politicized in
recent years, with local school board elections becoming proxy battles
for pro- and anti-charter sides. When privatizers ran into obstacles at
the L.A. school board, they focused on other high-ranking posts, such as
trying to influence the choice of the next city superintendent of
schools.

“The concept amazes and angers me,” board member Scott Schmerelson said
last fall about Broad’s proposal. “Far from being in the best interest
of children, it is an insult to teaching and administrative
professionals, an attack on democratic, transparent and inclusive public
school governance and negates accountability to taxpayers.”

Barr’s would-be candidacy comes after years of trying to pressure the city school board to take pro-charter positions, including
trying to create a parallel board of parents from charter schools as
competitor to the traditional PTA, or parent teachers association.

A mayoral campaign would be his—and the privatizers—most brazen move yet.

¿Brazen? There's an interesting word!

LAUSD has 4.5 million students? Really?? So much for declining enrollment! (LAUSD has 732,833 students, including adult ed.)

Peter Rabbit's father famously advised Peter that if he had nothing nice to say, then say nothing at all.

Frank Sinatra once told the press, referring to a individual whom he detested, that if they ever wanted to write something libelous or scanadalous about the person, they should feel free to attribute it to him.

The implication that Barr and the rest of the privatizer/$chool ®eform community act in concert mistakes that Barr is capable of being a team player or even a quiet conspirator. History teaches us otherwise - Barr is a self-promoting loose cannon on any and every deck - and because of that he and Donald Trump are dangerous.

Barr has “talked to at least a half-dozen people..." My guess is that they were all reporters. (The photo of Barr in the LATimes article cited above is a selfie - need I say more?)

New Los Angeles Unified School District Supt. Michelle King tours Windsor Hills Elementary School in Los Angeles, which she attended as a child. (Christina House / For The Times)

Jan 28, 2016 :: At the announcement that Michelle King had been promoted from deputy superintendent to the top leadership position at the huge and troubled Los Angeles Unified School District, the small throng gathered at district headquarters rose to its feet in applause.

The ovation was a "Survivor"-like salute to a member of the tribe. Here was someone who had navigated a high-stakes, politically treacherous enterprise in which, this year alone, 60,000 employees will spend more than $7 billion in taxpayer-supplied money to give 650,000 students a better chance at succeeding in life.

This very district, after all, had educated King since kindergarten. It provided her first job, as a teacher's aide, while she was still at Palisades High School. And for almost 30 years it has provided her livelihood.

Applause, however, doesn't necessarily mean she's the best person for the job.
If there's not much recent public evidence by which to evaluate King's suitability for one of the most important positions in education, it's because 10 years ago the district swallowed King into the upper reaches of its labyrinthine bureaucracy.

In a home movie of her life, that would be the point at which we switch from vibrant color into grainy black and white.

"It is hard to tell who's the real Michelle because she is always so dutiful to her bosses," said one source who requested anonymity. "I can't remember a time when she said: 'This is what I think.' It was always the party line."

King's earlier career provides some insight.

Take, for example, another show of support that came in 2002, when King walked into her first faculty meeting after being promoted from vice principal to principal at Hamilton High in Los Angeles' Palms neighborhood.

"The entire faculty burst into a standing ovation," says retired teacher Shelley Rose. "I've never seen it before or since."

Hamilton, it seems, had been tearing itself apart. The district had set up two magnet schools on the home campus as part of a strategy to lure back white students who had fled public schools. Some staff complained that the combined campus favored the wealthier, whiter magnets.

The staff already had confidence in King. As an assistant principal, she had "bridged all of the factions," says Merle Price, a former deputy superintendent.

As principal, she reassured the magnets that they could remain independent, while also addressing grievances from the neighborhood school, Price says.

Newly appointed L.A. Unified Supt. Michelle King stops by Century Park Elementary School during a two-day tour of the schools she attended as a child.

She also began to even out class sizes, so that the magnets no longer had far fewer students.
"Michelle united the faculty, boosted morale, and righted the ship almost immediately," says Barry Smolin, an English teacher. "A lot of it had to do with her calm demeanor, her willingness to hear all sides of an issue and make informed decisions based on sometimes conflicting perspectives — and her genuine concern for students and teachers."

One way she showed that concern, former colleagues say, was by letting teachers with nonconformist styles do things their way — an approach that has been notoriously foreign to some administrators.
English teacher Dan Victor, now retired, remembers telling King that a schoolwide assembly she'd called conflicted with his plan to prepare students for an Advanced Placement test the next day.

"Why don't you do what you think is best," she said.

He kept his students in class.

At least by some important measures her approach worked.

In each of the three years before King became principal, Hamilton's test scores had fallen short of the state's target for how much the school was supposed to improve.

After she took charge, the scores surged well past these annual goals.

She didn't solve all of Hamilton's problems, though.

The home school continued to perform below the state average and a large divide remained between the higher scores of whites and more prosperous students and those of low-income blacks and Latinos.

That "achievement gap" remains one of the most significant challenges in the district she now runs.
::
In thinking of the forces that shaped her, King recalls the riots of 1992 when, as a young teacher, she stood in her hillside home in South Los Angeles' largely African American, largely upscale View Park neighborhood, watching large swaths of Los Angeles burn.

Her father had become a lawyer while she was still a child. Her mother worked for the county. Together they provided their daughter with a sheltered life.

"It was assumed and expected you would go to college," King says. "My father looked at my report cards. We were taught to respect our teachers and that we would get good grades."

She attended L.A. Unified schools, including Palisades High, where she was a top student and a cheerleader and one of the few blacks at a school whose student body was mainly wealthy and white.
After attending UCLA, her first teaching assignment was in the San Fernando Valley, a world apart from the worst poverty of the L.A. basin.

King was not oblivious to social ills, but her understanding deepened, she said, as she watched the video of police officers beating Rodney King, followed by the trial that acquitted them.

The community rage that followed made an impression, firing up a long-standing instinct to help foundering students push ahead.

In high school she'd become a student aide because she liked helping students who were struggling. She also tutored at UCLA.

Later, she moved through teaching jobs at Porter Junior High and Wright Middle School while shepherding her own three daughters through school.

Sometimes that meant making choices. The first time King was offered the principal's job at Hamilton she turned it down. Her marriage by then was in trouble, and, even after the divorce, King was determined not to miss back-to-school nights or lose the family's tradition of long Sunday dinners, at which the girls could talk out the issues of their lives, she says.

When one of her daughters wanted to attend a girls school, King enrolled her in the private Archer School in Brentwood.

King says that watching how the all-girl school empowered her daughter made her believe in the value of single-gender schools — an option she has said she wants to expand in L.A. Unified.

Beyond that, King hasn't detailed specific new initiatives she'll suggest for the district, nor has the school board articulated how it plans to measure her success.

In recent years, success has meant remaining in the background and carrying out orders.

"Michelle never really had a chance or opportunity to stand out or share her thoughts," says longtime PTA leader Scott Folsom. "She is always quiet in meetings. I have never heard her disagree with or question the company line."

King acknowledges this trait.

"I've always followed the direction of my superintendent," she says. "I might not agree with him, but ultimately I'm a soldier and it's their ship. It's their vision and I'm going to follow it."

And, she says, she's learned from each superintendent she's served.

As Supt. Ramon C. Cortines' chief of staff, and later as chief deputy superintendent, she learned to "communicate and communicate and overly communicate, particularly with the Board of Education."
As head of operations for Supt. John Deasy, who replaced Cortines, and then was replaced by him after resigning under pressure in October 2014, King learned from "his unrelenting focus on youth and poverty," she says.

King also cites two readings that have influenced her approach to management.

The first befits a former science teacher: "Turning Research Into Results" by Richard Edward Clark and Fred Estes.

"I believe you gather data before you strike out," King says.

The other is "Leadership from the Middle: A System Strategy" by Michael Fullan.

Even now that she's at the top, being in the middle is where she seems most comfortable.

Those who know her best describe a regular-gal charm, a "margarita buddy" who got visibly embarrassed at the raunchier parts of the Spike Lee-produced movie "The Best Man," a person who likes to bowl and is pretty good at it.

Colleagues say she's easy to be with, a team player.

King says her devotion to collaboration was instilled early, as a new UCLA graduate in an intern program that shoved an unproven teacher in front of a room of seventh-graders ready to test her.
That trial by fire seared something into her mind. If her colleagues hadn't rallied to support her, she could have failed, King says. It taught her that educators need to rely on each other.

She wants to apply that same lesson to a fractured school system with a team that now includes parents and district critics. That, she says, is why the board hired her.

"They have charged me with bringing the district together," she said.

Times staff writers Zahira Torres and Sonali Kohli contributed to this report.

Friday, January 29, 2016

smf: Sometimes the news isn't necessarily new ...from Spring 2005

The LAUSD Magnet program is the legacy of Theodore T. "Ted" Alexander, Jr., for whom the Alexander Science and Math Magnet School in Exposition Park is named. Alexander was responsible for district integration after a 1977 court
order required Los Angeles schools to desegregate, a ruling that
prompted a citywide fight over mandatory busing.

To help defuse
community opposition to busing, Alexander supervised the establishment
of magnet schools. The magnet campuses achieved integration by
attracting students of all races from across the city with specialized
classes that included science, journalism and curricula for the
academically gifted. - from Alexander's LA Times obituary http://lat.ms/20yEXCR

The year was 1968. Martin Luther King had been assassinated, and
American cities were erupting in flames because of King’s violent death
and the decades-long smoldering resentments from racism. In a small city
far away from the churning ghettos of Detroit and D.C., a small public
school was about to enter the racial hubbub and become part of education
history.

Reminiscent
of scenes from the movie and musical Fame, which featured the High
School of Music & Art and became a model for magnet schools, young
musicians sing and play in a bathroom at La Guardia High School in
Manhattan.

That fall, McCarver Elementary in Tacoma, Washington, hung out its
shingle inviting students from anywhere in the city to enroll, breaking
the link between school assignments and residential location and
becoming the nation’s first “magnet” school. Thus began a nationwide
experiment to integrate public schools using market-like incentives
instead of court orders. (See sidebar, “In the Beginning.”)

The following year, 1969, the country’s second magnet school
opened–this one, more appropriately, in Boston, soon to be an epicenter
of the race-based school wars. But, like its West Coast counterpart, the
William Monroe Trotter School, in Beantown’s poor Roxbury section, was
built as “a showcase for new methods of teaching”–enough of a showcase,
it was hoped, to attract white children to a black neighborhood for
their schooling. It was an odd idea, but one whose time seemed to have
come. Within a decade there would be hundreds of such magnet schools all
over the country.

The idea was simple enough: draw white students to predominantly
black schools by offering a special education with a focus on a
particular aspect of the curriculum, such as performing arts, or
Montessori, or advanced math, science, and technology. Federal and state
agencies, anxious to avoid the growing messiness of coercive
integration measures like forced busing, directed new resources toward
these magnets, encouraging their pioneering academic programs and giving
grants for new facilities. Glossy brochures were mailed to parents and
press releases to local media. The hope was that these well-funded,
themed schools would ignite a passion for learning as well as spark a
movement to voluntarily integrate schools.

The names alone give a sense of the new schools’ range and
optimism–the Thomas Pullham Creative and Performing Arts magnet (in
Prince George’s County, Maryland), the Copley Square International High
magnet (in Boston), the School 59 Science magnet (also called the “Zoo
School,” in Buffalo), the Greenfield Montessori magnet school (in
Milwaukee), the Central High School Classical Greek/Computers Unlimited
magnet high school (in Kansas City). Even older and well-established
“examination schools,” such as Boston Latin and City Honors (in
Buffalo), would soon claim magnet status to avail themselves of new
students and additional funds.

An Early Experiment in “Choice”

The first magnets appeared as the school desegregation battles were
heating up. In 1969, the year William Monroe Trotter opened in Boston, a
federal court ordered the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district in
North Carolina to use busing to desegregate its schools. The use of
crosstown busing to accomplish desegregation was unprecedented–and the
case went right to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the highly
controversial forced integration program in 1971. A federal district
court in Boston, paying insufficient attention to the ideals of the
Trotter school, introduced a forced busing program in 1974 that set off
demonstrations and riots. The court order also prompted the city’s
educators to include magnets in their formal, citywide forced busing
plan the following year. Thus was born the first “forced busing plan
with magnet options.”

Coming as they did, in the midst of several different national
desegregation crises, early magnet schools offered a relatively
uncontroversial–and peaceful–means of integrating schools. And the
magnet movement got an early boost from two federal district court
decisions in 1976, in the aftermath of the discord in Charlotte and
Boston. In approving magnet-driven, voluntary desegregation programs in
Buffalo and Milwaukee, the courts seemed more than willing to accept
reasonable alternatives to the forced dissolution of geography-based
school assignments.
Though it was another decade before the first southern school
district (in Savannah) was allowed to desegregate its school system with
a voluntary magnet-school plan, the new schools were soon opening
almost everywhere–or, at least, everywhere that public school systems
needed to stem the white-flight resegregation that was overtaking many
urban school districts, mostly in the North. By 1981, there were some
1,000 such magnet schools in the United States; by 1991, there were over
2,400. (See Figure 1.)

These new schools proved to be a remarkably robust and popular trend
in school choice. In a study I undertook in 1989, I found that 12
percent of the elementary and middle school magnet programs in my sample
specialized in basic skills and/or individualized teaching; 11 percent
offered foreign language immersion; 11 percent were science-, math-, or
computer-oriented; 10 percent catered to the gifted and talented and 10
percent to the creative and performing arts; 8 percent were traditional,
back-to-basics programs (demanding, for instance, dress codes and
contracts with parents for supervision of homework); 7 percent were
college preparatory; 7 percent were early childhood and Montessori. (The
remaining preferences, each under 7 percent, included
multicultural/international, life skills/ careers, and
ecology/environment.) At the high school level, the programs tended to
be either career-oriented (medical careers, law and criminal justice,
communications and mass media, hotel and restaurant) or schools with
some sort of entrance criteria. The Magnet Schools Association of
America, based in Washington, D.C., reports a similar distribution of
program themes in today’s magnet schools.

My analyses of the success of these magnets in actually attracting
whites indicate that school structure and racial composition was
important. Predictably, the most popular magnet school structure was a
dedicated magnet, where everyone in the school had chosen it and all
were in the magnet program. These “perfect” magnets, however, were the
least common, because creating them requires that an entire school be
emptied out and children assigned elsewhere or a new school be built.
The next most popular magnet structure, and the most common today, is a
program-within-a-school. Only students who chose the magnet program are
in it, but there is also a neighborhood population assigned to the
school that is not in the magnet program. The racial composition of the
magnet program is different from the school that houses it and is
usually around 50 percent white.

The least-popular magnet structure in
black neighborhoods is a “whole-school-attendance-zone” magnet: everyone
in the school is in the program, but the school has a neighborhood
population assigned to it. That these schools and their magnet programs
tend to have a racial composition closer to that of the
neighborhood–majority minority–only reduces their attractiveness to
whites. However, according to most surveys, although whites prefer
majority white schools, a sizable, albeit smaller, number will choose
schools where whites make up somewhat less than half of the student
body.

Staying Power and an Evolving Mission

Even as courts across the country began releasing school districts
such as Kansas City, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Savannah, Buffalo, and
Boston from long-running desegregation orders during the 1990s, magnet
schools continued to thrive. My 1991 randomized national sample of 600
school districts indicated that the 2,400 magnet schools in the United
States were operating in 229 different school districts.

And it would appear that their ranks continue to swell despite the
declining number of districts operating under court-ordered
desegregation plans. The directory published by the Magnet Schools
Association of America lists more than 3,000 magnet or theme-based
schools as members.
With desegregation waning as a public goal, however, magnet schools
have maintained support by attaching themselves to the school-choice
movement. For instance, the Magnet Schools of America web site now makes
a classic choice-based argument on behalf of magnet schools–that being
allowed to choose a school will result in improved satisfaction that
translates into better achievement. Thus, although proponents of magnet
schools have not disavowed the desegregation goal that is the program’s
roots, they currently place almost equal emphasis on magnets as
instruments of school choice.

One of the reasons for the sustained growth of magnet schools is the
federal government’s steady financial support for the idea. Magnet
schools were originally funded as tools of desegregation under the
Emergency School Assistance Act from 1972 to 1981. In 1981 they were
folded into the Chapter 2 block-grant program, but explicit federal
support for magnet schools as desegregation tools resumed in 1985 with
the authorization of the Magnet Schools Assistance Program (MSAP),
included in the Education for Economic Security Act. Under the new
program, however, magnet schools not only had to aid desegregation, but
also had to focus on improving the quality of education in order to
qualify for funds. The Magnet Schools Assistance Program still exists,
now run by the Office of Innovation and Improvement in the Department of
Education, and with the same twin goals of fostering integration and
choice.

Funding for magnet schools is also part of the No Child Left Behind
Act of 2001, housed in the portion of the law bannered “Promoting
Informed Parental Choice and Innovative Programs.” Funding has not kept
pace with either inflation or the growth in magnet schools, but neither
has it withered away. (See Figure 2.) The MSAP appropriation was $75
million in 1984, rose to $108 million in 1994, and remained at $108
million in 2004. Though the program falls under the law’s choice
provisions, the federal government still considers magnets an important
aspect of desegregation policy, defining a magnet school as one that
“offers a special curriculum capable of attracting substantial numbers
of students of different racial backgrounds.”

The Money Bite

Perhaps the greatest challenge to magnet schools now comes from
fiscal constraints at the state level. Where desegregation has become a
secondary goal, resource-rich magnet schools are often a target for cuts
when money is tight. States such as Missouri, Ohio, and Michigan have
challenged court-ordered desegregation plans in order to reduce their
financial and legal liability. But even states such as Massachusetts,
Maryland, and California that were never parties to a desegregation
lawsuit have been cutting funds for magnet schools. The Prince George’s
County, Maryland, school district, for example, eliminated magnet
programs at 33 schools in the fall of 2004 because of state funding
cutbacks. The only theme programs that will be kept are the Montessori,
French immersion, and creative and performing arts, and they will no
longer be called magnets.

Indeed, there is probably no school district with an extensive system
of magnet programs that has not closed at least one or two magnets
because of a budget crunch. In fact, many magnets are the victims of
their own success: by the 1990s most neighborhood schools had the
science labs and computer technology that had once made magnets unique.
Even McCarver in Tacoma removed “magnet” from its name in 1998 and, as a
result of No Child Left Behind, became a School in Need of Improvement.
Connecticut is an important exception to this trend, but that is
because since 1996, the entire state has been under a state supreme
court order to desegregate. Using a complicated formula approved by the
court, the state funds magnet schools that accept students from several
different districts (at a minimum there must be two) at a per-pupil rate
that increases as the number of districts sending students increases–an
attempt to bring central-city minority students and white suburban
students together in the same school. Thus the scheme eschews outright
racial quotas, but achieves some of the diversity that quotas would
create.

Challenges for the Future

Though finances will always be a magnet school’s primary concern, the
greatest threat to the magnet system going forward is the same as that
which gave magnets their early jump-start: the courts. Even the No Child
Left Behind Act’s requirement that school districts adopt a voluntary
desegregation plan, for instance, may conflict with legal precedents set
in most federal appeals courts. In 2001 only the federal appeals court
covering the states of Connecticut, New York, and Vermont had upheld the
use of race in student assignment or magnet school admissions in school
districts not already under court order; it did so on the grounds that
the state had a compelling interest in racial diversity. But even in
that circuit, several school districts and one state (Connecticut) have
continued to avoid the use of racial quotas in magnet admissions because
they believe using them invites a legal challenge.
The 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing the use of racial
quotas at the University of Michigan–but approving the use of race as
one of many factors in admissions decisions–has had little impact on
magnet schools, mainly because most had already abandoned the use of
quotas. And most school districts now recognize that using explicit
racial quotas in magnet admissions when desegregation orders have been
lifted is risky. When the court-ordered desegregation plan in Prince
George’s County was ended in 2002, the superintendent formed a panel of
experts on magnet schools that was thought to be politically and
ideologically diverse. Our task was to figure out what to do about
magnet school admissions criteria.

All of us were in agreement that race could no longer be used in
magnet admissions. We devised a plan in which the district was divided
into three subdistricts of roughly similar racial and socioeconomic
balance. Students, regardless of their race, could choose any magnet
school in their subdistrict. We hoped that racially diverse student
bodies would result from the individual choices of students, but there
was no way to guarantee it. Since then, as noted above, state funding
cuts have prompted the district’s administration to dramatically reduce
the number of magnet schools, keeping only the most popular. Similar
choices are being made in other districts, where some magnets survive
while others are being closed.

Districts throughout the country are responding in one of two ways:
either adopting a race-blind system of admissions, thus converting the
magnet to a themed school of choice; or constructing a system whereby
race is only one of several factors considered in admission. The former
is more likely to happen in school districts that have very few whites
left and in districts that have had strong appeals court opinions
rejecting the use of race altogether. The latter is more likely to occur
in school districts such as Fort Wayne, Indiana, that have enough
whites left to actually integrate a number of magnet schools and where
there has been no strong circuit court decision rejecting the use of
race.
It is remarkable, perhaps, that despite the reduction in state
funding and the elimination of explicit racial quotas, the total number
of magnet schools has not declined. I would suggest three reasons for
their resilience. First, the great triumph of the civil-rights movement
was its success in getting whites to support the principle of racial
diversity in the schools. In districts that still have enough whites to
make integration feasible, magnet schools are viewed as an effective way
to achieve that diversity, even in districts where court orders have
been lifted or never existed. Second, magnet schools have been
incorporated into the school choice movement as a means of improving
achievement and into No Child Left Behind as a way of increasing the
opportunities available to children in low-performing schools. Third,
parents like school choice. Although undoubtedly there are some who
enroll their children in a theme-based school in order to enable them to
pursue a passion, most parents are probably interested in theme-based
education as a means of igniting a passion. Magnets have thus
developed strong constituencies locally and nationally and, for the
foreseeable future, remain an important, if less often noticed, feature
of the American education landscape.

Christine Rossell is a professor of political science at Boston University.

by Alex Sergienko
Every once in a while things work out. That’s what it seems like
today, as I look back to 1968, when my Tacoma, Washington, school
district opened a magnet school.
Though Tacoma had only about 7,000 blacks–out of a total population
of about 160,000–our minority housing, like that in many cities, was
concentrated in one area and served by schools then in violation of our
state’s de facto segregation rule. The worst “offender” was McCarver
Elementary, which was 91 percent African-American.

In fact, we had begun work on segregation issues several years
earlier. People were coming to school board meetings complaining about
it, and one prominent board member was adamant about integration. We
also had a citizens committee, with two African-American members,
actively seeking solutions. And, like other cities, we had some racial
disturbances in Tacoma after Martin Luther King’s assassination.

We knew we had to do something, but we also wanted alternatives to
the coercive methods of integration, such as forced busing, that we saw
being talked about elsewhere. That’s when we stumbled on an article
about someone in Pittsburgh advocating the establishment of a school
that would do something so well that students would want to enroll. They
called it a “magnet school.” I’d never heard the term, but suddenly we
envisioned McCarver as a school of excellence–good enough to pull in
white students from the more affluent neighborhoods. We wrote a
proposal, called the “Exemplary Magnet Program,” and in the summer of
1968 we received a $200,000 Title III grant to make it happen.

We then mounted a huge recruitment effort, enlisting counselors from
our summer program to make home visits (to talk to parents) and had
administrators make calls to the district’s best teachers. We said again
and again that we would use exemplary practices, such as team teaching
and “continuous progress”–and it worked. Some very good teachers signed
up. And we brought in the most popular principal, then at the best
elementary school in town, to run things.

With luck, a lot of work, and some key support from members of the
upscale North End community, we were able to draw kids from all over,
even from suburban schools on the other side of Puget Sound. And we
opened that September with a minority enrollment of 64 percent, a
27-point turnaround in just four months. Instead of 50 white kids, we
had almost 200.

By 1970, African-American enrollment at McCarver was less than 50
percent, and we had a waiting list for parents seeking to enroll their
children.

After 36 years, I’m still struck by what we were able to get done. It
is wonderful to think that good things can be accomplished in this
world.

Alex Sergienko was an assistant superintendent of schools in
Tacoma when McCarver started its magnet program. His grandson Max is a
7th grader at a magnet school, in Portland, Oregon, with “a Japanese
emphasis.”